People are complaining that the health care bill that is currently on the verge of being law is flawed.
Well, duh. People who actually claim that this bill should not become law because it is flawed come in two flavors:
1) Those who are simply against all health care reform and are just blowing this out of one orifice or another. Birthers, teabaggers, Republicans, heatlh care lobbyists, other undesirables.
2) People who have little knowledge of how these things work and just woke up to find that reality is not what they assumed, in their ignorance it to be. Have you ever heard of the EPA and environmental regulation? The “Great Society” and legal protections for disadvantaged groups? The New Deal and banking regulation?
All three of those major shifts if the interrelationship between society and government, all of which progressives look back on and can justifiably claim to be good things, started out as sucky law. This is how it is done. You propose some good law, the yahoos show up and delay, damage, mess with the process until you finally have something that can’t pass. Then you give up.
Then you come back and do it again. And again. And again. And finally, you get the law passed.
Then you have this law that is not what you wanted, but you DO have a bill. You are now, finally, at the table. The basic idea of having laws of some kind dealing with a basic issue … racial discrimination, environmental protection, banking regulation, or people- and health-oriented health care insurance regulation … is then a reality, and further negotiations must start from that point, in stead of the perspective that the notion of reform is alien.
If you look a those early versions for these other, earlier efforts they were much less developed and probably much less effective than the current health care bill is. And to demonstrate that, I give you the recently posted list of ten good things about this bill from Moveon.org:
Continue reading Moveon.org’s 10 Things Every American Should Know About Health Care Reform